The present invention relates generally to digital advertisement distributions, and more particularly but not exclusively to enabling advertisements to be inserted at a point of consumption to refresh advertisements in offline content and/or virally distributed content in a manner such that the consumer is inhibited from skipping past the advertisements.
Today, content owners, and/or providers are seeking new revenue opportunities with Internet distribution of the content. However, consumers of such content often prefer to receive ‘free’ content. This situation tends to make advertisement placement a tremendous opportunity for content owner revenue. Unfortunately, many content owners are facing a number of technical hurdles that inhibit their ability to realize a scale similar to that of revenue in the video distribution as has been experienced in the broadcast television arena. Such hurdles include but are certainly not limited to how does one determine that an advertisement is watched by the consumer, either online in real-time, or offline? How may one ensure that an advertisement is not removed from the video, or skipped, such that the consumer avoids viewing of the advertisement? During peer-to-peer redistribution of a video how may one ensure that the advertisement is also distributed and/or later consumed? When an advertisement is distributed, such as virally (peer-to-peer distributions), how may one ensure that the advertisement is consumed downstream? Moreover, as such digital content may survive in the network or even within a client device for an indefinite period of time, how may one avoid stale advertising content, and still glean incremental advertisement revenue from the viewing of older content? In addition, content owners and advertisers may wish to provide advertisements based on a specific consumer, consumer type, and/or geographic region. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made